When Martha died, biologists didn't even know that genes are encoded in DNA. While technology spelled the doom of passenger pigeons, some scientists believe they can use technology to bring the species back. Martha, the last of her kind, was barren. But the birds proved to be poor breeders in captivity. They never saw another one in the wild again.įor the next 14 years, the species clung to existence in a few zoos. In 1900, the year in which the act was made into law, naturalists spotted a single wild passenger pigeon in Ohio. The Lacey Act would eventually help protect many species, but for the passenger pigeon it came too late. Its decline was so worrisome that Congress passed the Lacey Act, one of the first laws to protect wildlife in the United States. Soon this technology-driven slaughter was decimating the passenger pigeon. "Technology enabled the market," says Blockstein. Pigeons would be stuffed into barrels and loaded back onto the trains, which would deliver them to distant cities, where they'd be sold everywhere from open air markets to fine restaurants. The hunters weren't just killing the birds to feed their families, however. Thousands of hunters would then jump on newly built trains to ride out to wherever the pigeons had settled and start slaughtering them. "The telegraph allowed word to go out: 'The pigeons are here,'" says David Blockstein, a senior scientist at the National Council for Science and the Environment and a founder of Project Passenger Pigeon. But they didn't realize that a technological revolution was about to hit. It was hard for early naturalists to imagine that the passenger pigeon could ever become extinct. (Read " Bringing Them Back to Life" in National Geographic magazine.)Īnd whether scientists are able to bring passenger pigeons back or not, the birds may still offer lessons about keeping other species from following it into oblivion. Others are analyzing bits of passenger pigeon DNA to reconstruct its lost ways of life. One team of scientists is even trying to bring the species back from extinction, using genetic engineering and cloning. "It became the icon of extinction," says Mark Barrow, a historian at Virginia Tech and the author of Nature's Ghosts.Ī hundred years later, the passenger pigeon remains iconic and is inspiring extravagant new technological feats. #Passenger pigeon fullOther species were also spiraling toward extinction in the late 1800s, but the destruction of the passenger pigeon happened on full public display. But they proved no match for humans, whose rapidly advancing technology drove the birds to extinction in a matter of decades. As recently as the mid-1800s, deafening flocks of billions of passenger pigeons swarmed across the eastern half of the United States. But on that first day of September a century ago, Martha no longer had to put up with such humiliations. As Joel Greenberg writes in his recent book A Feathered River Across the Sky, some threw sand into its cage to try to force it to walk around. People coming to the zoo to see the last passenger pigeon were disappointed by the bird, which barely budged off its perch. At the Cincinnati Zoo, a passenger pigeon named Martha died at the age of 29. A hundred years ago on Monday, a once-mighty species became extinct.
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